Secondhand Sorcery

Rehearsal was running long, and Marko Hushchyn knew he was not the only one who was growing tired. Opening night was a week away, and the cast all knew their lines, and their timing was perfect—but something was missing. There was no fire in them, and Marko knew why. They all did, though they wouldn’t say it. Frankly, Marko did not care anymore. Ticket sales would be poor as well, and everyone knew that too. If the gentlemen from St. Petersburg did not know that yet, well, they would find out soon enough, and Marko would let the numbers speak for themselves.

Bulgakov had been a fine playwright, and The Days of the Turbins was a fine play, but the people of Ukraine were not stupid, least of all Crimean urbanites, the next worst thing to emigres. They did not care for condescension, were insulted by propaganda. And a tragic performance, in four acts, of the last stand of the White Guards in Kiev—well! Marko had asked to do The Storm. It too was a famous Russian play, with the added virtue of being a bit more subtle than a brick thrown at one’s forehead. But no—denied. They wanted The Days of the Turbins, nothing less.

All the same, he reflected, as Dmytro struggled to show concern at his character’s impending death, they were not the only ones who needed to perform for a living. Every other man and woman in this room was here because they either needed the money or owed Marko Hushchyn a favor. But Marko himself was present on sufferance; this career was a luxury, and he was expected to give good value for it.

It was too late for Turbins, but he hadn’t selected a project for the summer yet. He could do Sheaves, a new script written by a promising young lady from Kharkiv about her grandparents’ experiences in the Holodomor. Superficially, the text was anti-Russian, but it could be made anti-Soviet easily enough, without ruffling too many local feathers. Yes. It would do.

It was a blessed relief when his phone rang. He looked at it, saw who was calling, and motioned the cast to stand down. At once they drifted away, doffing the less comfortable parts of their costumes. Marko did not spare them a second glance, but moved out of the rehearsal area and earshot before taking the call.

Uritsky was terse, as usual. Marko appreciated that. The actual content of his message, less so, though he was not surprised that the old grey ass Yefimov had failed to rectify his mistakes. It had been foolish to use him for a task of such delicacy in the first place. Competent and useful men didn’t get sent to work in Moldova, for God’s sake. The man was of an age to be pensioned; instead they’d let him out of his sinecure to raise hell in a critical theater of operations. Marko had laughed when he botched it. It was less funny now that his brats were running loose on the wrong damned side of the Black Sea!

“They’ll be going for Kerch next,” he said as he hurried out to his car. Someone else could make his excuses to the actors.

“We have already alerted Krasnodar; they will close off the bridge.”

“That will only slow them down a few seconds. If that.” He started the ignition, which of course picked that moment to stick. He’d ordered a Ferrari in anticipation of moments like this, when speed would be essential. Naturally they got him a trash knockoff with counterfeit parts. This damned country—no, this damned regime! “Are they going to alert Tatiana, or is this entirely our problem?”

“Tatiana’s monitoring a disturbance near Sochi. Some kind of demonstration. We’re on our own.”

“Worthless bitch.” The engine turned over, and he backed out, nearly ramming an old Zhiguli. “They’ll be wrecking her place next. Serves her right.”

“Is that what you will tell the knyazya?”

An insolent question. Probably well-meant, but insolent. This district was too quiet. Uritsky would remember what an oprichnik could do soon enough. “I’m in Simferopol, headed for the airport. Tell them to have something ready—anything that can fly—or somebody will learn the taste of his own balls.” He ended the call without waiting for a reply.

The airport was across town, but it was a Saturday afternoon and the roads were clear enough. He wove around the slower vehicles. Could the children make it to the eastern end of the peninsula on the ground faster than he could get in the air and fly to intercept? The answer depended entirely on how lazy, incompetent, or obstructive the airport staff chose to be. If they were the reason the little pricks got away, he would make an example for Yezhov to shudder at.

The phone rang again; he swore, and took one eye from the road to glance before picking up. Sergei? Sergei Bryzgalov? Were they mad enough to attack the port itself? “I am on my way to the airport,” he snapped into the phone. “Be brief.” Sergei’s reply was incoherent, a frantic mess of spluttering and gasps. “Damn it, man, are you drunk? At this hour?”

“Polina!” the General screeched, so loud that Marko swerved across two lanes by accident. “Polina! She was at the station, at Krasnoperekopsk!”

Krasnoperekopsk. Right in the path of the hellions. He closed his eyes for a half-second—the road was clear—and offered up a too-brief prayer for the soul of his goddaughter. There would be time for a proper memorial later. He needed his eyes dry. “I am sorry to hear it,” was his brusque reply. His thumb jabbed the button to hang up as he tossed it into a cup holder. He screamed with rage when the phone rang yet again five seconds later. “Damn it! What now?”

It was one of Sergei’s aides this time, crisply informing him that Ms. Polina’s phone had been found at what remained of the station, with a note in her handwriting claiming to have been kidnapped.

“Really,” he said, thinking hard. The airport was in sight now; he cut off a bus and ran a red light to get there slightly quicker. It sounded like the bus hit something behind him, but he didn’t turn to look. “Have you told Krasnodar?”

“Not yet.”

“Do. Thank you.” And he hung up again, praying this would be the last call. And it was; he received a number of texts from Uritsky, which he was free to ignore until he got to the airport and onto a commandeered police helicopter, but no calls. The messages were a useful distraction from the terror he always felt in helicopters. He browsed slowly as the bird climbed over the airport: Lost radio contact with a military blockade near Kirovskoye; blockade found as collection of burning wrecks; police car shot up while in pursuit of speeding trucks on E97.

The enemy were making good time, but he could catch up. Kerch police had visual on their little convoy now, from the air, and it was a forty-minute flight for Marko. Perhaps forty-five. It would be tight, but manageable. He might yet salvage the last bridge off the Crimea.

Twenty minutes into the flight he got an angry call from the commander at Kherson, complaining that the latest shipment for their brave men at Constantinople had derailed, with several lives lost. They said the track had been sabotaged! Was this how an oprichnik did his duty to the Motherland? Their men, and the future of Holy Rus’, were depending on those supplies!

Marko promised to look into it, then hung up. He got out his silver wolf’s-head cross from around his neck—a present from Sergei, he abruptly recalled—and said a silent prayer for all the fools of the world. And for Polina. If she was dead, he would send her killers to serve her in the next world. If she was alive … well, he would try to kill them anyway, if he could. They were only children, stupid, impetuous children, but there were still four of them, and one of him, and likely most of them had more combat experience. He’d only earned that silver cross two years ago, when he graduated the program.

He tapped the copilot on the shoulder, shouted “Can this thing fly in a halo?” He repeated the question twice over rotor noise, finally getting a look of frank bewilderment and giving up. Either he couldn’t be heard or the man simply didn’t know, but even a moment’s loss of concentration could be fatal for the men flying this damnable vehicle. It would be stupid to risk a crash for a few minutes’ advantage; they would land, then fight, as much as the loss of time chafed.

They were still five minutes out when they lost radio contact with the chopper trailing the children. Last reported location: two kilometers out from the bridge, two minutes earlier. Marko was grateful now for the thumping of the blades; he could scream and rage as he liked and not disturb the pilots. But only for a little while. The seconds were still precious.

This could be salvaged. The bridge was quite long, perhaps twenty kilometers. Until they got off the far end they could not deviate from a predictable path, and Krasnodar’s silly roadblock would slow them down. It would cost many lives, but he could yet arrive in time to avenge the day’s atrocities. Visions of a new play flashed through his mind: the heroes of Kerch Strait, giving their lives to buy time for justice. A new Thermopylae! That would satisfy the louts in St. Petersburg.

He shook his head. Absurd.

Marko always kept a ryumka or two about his person, a smaller than fashionable dose, just enough to secure a beachhead. At present, he had three tucked into his coat—ectoplasm, at least, was abundant—but he would not use them until he had to. The helicopter made for Taman’, just across the bridge, while Marko said his last prayers for himself, for his wife, for his goddaughter, for all the newly dead, and those doubtless yet to come, and for the four children he hoped to kill.

Baby Poliusha in his arms, fresh from baptism in a new white gown. Would he have to send her to the bottom of the Strait, to do his duty to Holy Rus’? An obscenity.

They crossed the water two kilometers away from the bridge, with enough altitude for Marko to see the long line of disintegration crawling slowly across it. More than halfway there already. The Afghan brat’s work, most likely, with the bubbles, or the traitor girl from Kazakhstan. Damn either one. Every port along the Sea of Azov would be closed until they cleared the wreckage.

Whoever it was, the chopper outstripped them easily, and swung low over the fields on the far side, where a few trembling boys were setting up obsolete Soviet-era artillery. Marko jumped off as they were landing, taking the shock of the last five feet in a clumsy roll and feeling it in every bone. Fool that he was. He was forty-six years old, his army service was two decades behind him, and he surely looked a jackass. What a fine example for these timid conscripts, and all to save a few seconds!

He made a late attempt to salvage his dignity with a brief show of dusting himself off. A year in a cushioned director’s chair had given him something of a belly, and the clothes he wore to rehearsal had been rumpled even before he rolled in the dirt. Your hero, lads! Thank God none of them could possibly recognize him. Marko Hushchyn, the latest suspiciously well-connected darling of the Crimean theater scene, was never photographed for any of his glowing magazine interviews.

But the boys with the guns were only an audience now—an audience, and a source of fuel for his art, and the two could be much the same even on the stage. Marko had all the superstitions of an accomplished thespian; he kissed his cross once more, and rolled up his left sleeve to read once again the words inked into the skin: Play well, or play badly, but play truly. Then he shook the sleeve back down, and began.

He was always coy, in those fatuous interviews, about what brought him into drama. It was a common question, the story was romantic enough, and it galled him terribly to sit on it for anything so trite as “national security,” or even his own. Always he would vomit out some vague and tedious blither about being a young man at loose ends, and too much energy, and not enough to do with it. It was not a lie—he preferred not to lie—but it was never the entire truth.

He never told them of the cold and rainy spring of 1995, and the idiotic bungling that left a newly discharged corporal without housing and only half of his last paycheck. He did not describe the gnawing sensation in his empty and ulcerated stomach, or the snapping wolves’ teeth of desperation at his heels with every step. The local community theater, lit inside but locked. He did not know it was only auditions, and the back door was open. He only knew he was wet, and tired of being wet, and on the edge of becoming distressingly sober, and he was damned if he would move on another step. He smashed the glass and unlocked the door himself. He told himself it was just to get somewhere dry, just a minute. But then, there would be a cash register somewhere in there. Was it empty? He only wondered.

If he had known then that he was walking into a madhouse, he might not have continued. What kind of lunatic would take a disheveled, muddy drunk, found in the lobby under grossly suspicious circumstances, and ask him to try out, purely because he liked the way the lout shouted at the well-groomed college students dragging him out the door? And give him the part of Trigorin, of all parts, and tut conspicuously at the naughty local boys throwing rocks at the glass, in defiance of all reason? Where the hell was the rock?

Bare boards and a blank wall. Marko had never bothered with any of it before; it was not even within the sphere of consideration for a near-illiterate soldier. The play itself struck him as moronic, full of the contemptible troubles of moral degenerates with no real problems. But he had a good memory, and all they needed was a passionate man, a man who had experienced every kind of rise and fall and could live through it again. He could be a degenerate, because he knew he already was.

There was no insincerity in drama done right. Only transformation. The bonds of individual experience slipped away, the particular melted away into the universal, and men and women faded into types only to re-emerge, by some terrible alchemy, as strange chimeras, true and false parts confused into a reality beyond the merely factual. It was a dreadful, magical thing, and the more he did it, the more he became certain that it came so natural because he had done it all his life before. He had always been an actor, always had his several parts to play, different for every audience. Were other men any different?

Ardent came out of the earth as he always had, with abrupt and violent strength. The ground shook for an instant, gave way just as the first shouts of alarm broke out, and disgorged a giant. A man-shaped colossus of smooth black stone, burning hot and half-molten. The muscles slid beneath his immaculate skin like magma flowing under the ground. His eyes were red and angry, and waves of heat rippled off his skin, promising danger.

A convulsion took him, and he was a man no longer but a bird, a gigantic bird of prey, soaring into the sky and trailing fire and ash behind him. The nemesis approached, an ugly fat beast riding a chariot of steel and destroying as he came. An ogre from fairy-tale—but holding a fair damsel hostage. This would require skill. Ardent reshaped himself again at the peak of his flight, letting his fire shine through like the sun and melt him. Now he was a divine being from Hindu lore, graceful and many-armed, dancing in the sky. He reached inside himself, tore out hot gobbets of his own sacred flesh, and flung them.

It was an irony Marko had often appreciated, that the emissants of others, bound to more particular stories, could not exert themselves beyond their own halos. The real world, as they called it, would not allow freaks and monsters into its space. It was probably coincidence—but who knew?—that his versatile friend could transcend this limitation. It only so happened that there was nothing in physics to suggest that burning rock could not move at very high speed, and so it did, slowing down and cooling only a little before it struck the near end of the bridge and blasted it to fragments.

The leading truck in the little convoy slammed on the brakes at once, though Ardent had left them plenty of space. He preferred the dramatic possibilities of a broad stage. They would have nearly a kilometer to play in. It was only a shame that they would not have more of an audience, but so be it. It would make a fine story later. For the moment, Ardent changed his shape again, and like a falcon folded in his wings to dive for the kill.